If you're tired about talking about the real estate market and soccer leagues, and you want to liven up discussion at a party with people with children of a certain age, talk about how you manage your children's Internet access.
Some parents long for every opportunity to monitor and control their children's access to the Internet. Others take a more lassiez-faire attitude. My wife and I are certainly more relaxed than some, although we do have limits.
The Internet and the Death of Childhood Privacy
From a child's perspective, one of the important implications of the Internet is that it makes it possible for parents to know what they are doing at a level of detail that was previously impracticable.
The Denver Public Schools has a system that allows you to see your older child's every quiz grade, every absence and tardy notation, every homework assignment and pretty much everything else that the system has noted regarding your child in something approximating real time.
While they have the power to put passwords on their library cards, they don't, so that I can manage online book renewals and fill my household role a book return heavy, thereby minimizing library fines which is an area where we have imposed early personal financial responsibility. So, I know what they check out for the library. I can also monitor the e-books and e-audio books that they enjoy.
Netflix keeps track of which streaming media are watched for how long on which days, and which DVDs are mailed and returned. It doesn't take much in the way of investigative skills to figure out who is watching what when. If I wished, I could also impose parental controls on that account.
I could impose parental controls on my children's Internet usage, audit their web browsing histories, and more, if I was so inclined. For the moment, at least, I have the log in information to my children's e-mail accounts (all pseudonymous), so I can see how they write to, how often, what they write and when. It is also child's play to look at my daughter's cell phone and see who she has called and texted when and what was said in the texts.
Since they don't have cars yet and don't have license to wander our urban residential neighborhood very far without an accompanying adult, they can't really come and go from the house without us knowing where they are going.
The old school days when you insisted on looking at your child's report card and snooped in their diary and under their beds now and then look positively hands off compared to what is possible these days. Children roamed small town streets on bikes, food and skateboards with all the freedom of outdoor cats so long as they were home in time for dinner or called from a friend's house to say that they were having dinner there. Local phone calls on landlines and notes passed on scraps of paper in class were not logged and hard to intercept. Nobody's television kept a record of what was being watched when that parents could review later. Library records weren't available for parents to review at the touch of a key while they were on lunch break. A child who was the first to the mailbox in the afternoon even had a plausible shot at intercepting letters directed to them through the postal service.
Bad Stuff It Is Out There
The Internet is not a rated PG forum. There is hard core pornography easily available for free to anyone savvy enough to write a Google search; some of it could even land someone in prison. This is far different from the days when you have to find someone to buy it for you, brave an inquiring neighborhood shop clerk, or engage in petty theft to see it, and even it wasn't nearly so vivid.
Cyber bullying and sexting are not unheard of phenomena, although they seem to be mostly outgrowths of real life interactions.
Phishing scams rolling in constantly to every web address and cause real financial harm.
A public embarrassment on line has the ultimate global audience and can't be erased by any reasonable means.
One of the biggest differences between controlling parents and those who are more relaxed is an assessment of how much of a risk, in terms of likelihood, seriousness and preventability is involved in these things.
Total Control Isn't Easy
We encourage them to use their computers in public view but they have laptops, they not infrequently have homework that requires computer use (my daughter had an insane amount of educational computer games for a math class last year in addition to the demands of other classes like social studies report and essay writing), and it is frequently best for family harmony if they do their work in their own rooms.
If my children were of a mind to keep secrets, they could in a variety of ways that they have the technical know how to manage if they were so inclined. If they were of a mind to use family credit cards to make online purchases, they could (although we'd know that someone made them when the statements came in each month if we paid enough attention and the purchases weren't sufficiently bland).
Having some sense of what your children are up to much of the time doesn't take much effort. Perfectly reliable monitoring and control is nearly impossible without becoming a real tyrant and consuming vast amounts of everyone's time in the process.
Why We Don't Fear Forbidden Fruit
Honestly, the best weapon in the fight against inappropriate Internet use is boredom. They simply are not interested in pushing the envelope. They'd rather watch the latest Disney drek than media aimed at older viewers. Long minutes of teenagers snogging, or worse, rates as seriously boring so far. Stop action you tube flicks of dancing Barbies to the latest tune from the radio, or cute kittens has more appeal than subversive political or religious messages. My working assumption is that adult material won't be interesting until they are ready, or almost ready for it.
We aren't terribly afraid of knowledge, even when it is a bit off color. Secrets can be corrosive, and are hard to hide within a family, and maintaining and preserving an inaccurate air brushed view of the world is even harder. We try not to put off questions, and instead to provide the answers to the questions that are really being asked without adding the undue adult emotional baggage than avoiding questions in the interests of the taboos of polite society can. We try to be truthful, factual and bland when the question and the person asking it don't indicate that it is asked, for example, "why are we learning about AIDS and HIV in a 4th grade Family Life class, the required a special permission slip?", indicate that a bare bones answer will satisfy curiosity without a full fledged birds and the bees talk.
If anything, mystery can call attention and interest to subject that tweens and even teen would otherwise find boring and uninteresting. We don't fetishize wine and liquor as forbidden fruits, and talk about the consequences of drinking too much without undue moralizing and without touting a prohibitionists line we don't adhere to. The same applies to material on the Internet that they don't need but don't necessarily want either, if we don't call attention to it.
Google holds the keys to lots of accurate information, as well as lots of mischief, work with them in research related homework projects has helped us to teach them how to distinguish trustworthy and not so trustworthy sources, and there will no doubt be queries in their lives at some point that would be mutually embarrassing for them to ask us that they can get authoritative, accurate answers to over the Internet, just as my generation did from the reference section and non-fiction books in the library. I'd rather that they have the means to get accurate information without asking an adult or letting us know that they are even asking, than not have information that they need at all. Sometimes a question about chlamydia asked because of a concern about a friend really is a question asked because of a concern about a friend. But what adult can help but to leap to suspicions? And, what smart kid doesn't know that they will?
Our main worry is not inappropriate media, or Internet predators. It is Internet and media overload. The limits that we impose have more to do with "how much" than they do with "what" online and media exposure they receive. So long as the number of hours they spend in front of a screen isn't excess, and we do impose limits in that regard, we don't worry much. If they are still reading books, getting outdoor activity, spending time with friends, keeping on top of their homework and so on, a little indulgence is accepted.
Most serious online trouble involves overindulgence. A kid who watches 3 minutes of porn once is not going to be scared for life. A kid who watches hours of it on a regular basis for weeks may get pretty messed up and not realize that this is adult fantasy and not reality. Obsession is more often a problem that knowledge.
In our privacy free online world (so far), sometimes they get caught exceeding the boundaries. Minor transgressions, like a quick check in with an age appropriate online world they have a character in, or a check of an e-mail account, between bouts of homework, are overlooked, although we don't leave them with the illusion that they are putting one over on us. A parental reputation for omniscience can discourage a multitude of sins. Major transgressions are usually punished in kind; watching a movie or playing a video game when you weren't permitted to on Tuesday night may mean forfeiting the chance to do so on Friday after school.
Strategic Reasons For a Light Touch
We try not to be disproportionate in our reactions to a great extent for strategic reasons. We'd like parental discovery of their activities to loom as a lesser tragedy than the alternatives if they get over their head. For example, we wouldn't want them to avoid letting us know about a cyber bully or someone communicating with them inappropriately out of excessive fear of punishment for using the Internet when they weren't supposed to be doing so.
We know perfectly well that we can't hope to be fully informed about what our children do with their friends and their romantic travails as teenagers. But we'd like to think that if the risks of talking to us aren't too high, and questions about their social lives remain as routine and inevitable as our questions about what kind of cake there was at the birthday party and whether it was home made, that we might at least have some sense of who most of the more important people in their lives are these days, and of what those people are like.
Let's face it. Hosting parties for your kids is not simply something that you do out of the goodness of your heart. It is also a part of a comprehensive intelligence strategy to figure out what kind of kids your children choose as company.
At some point, you can no longer choose your children's friends (or eventually, their lovers). But if you keep the door open while remaining basically honest, you can hope to provide some feedback to your child about the people in their lives, for what it is worth, that will be considered as they make their own decisions for themselves. If you acknowledge that sooner or later you will lose control, maintaining credibility becomes more important than bolstering your authority. If you can maintain credibility and stay well enough informed to know when there are opinions to be offered, you don't need hard authority over your children.
Kids have been defying their parents in matters of friendship and love since long before Romeo and Juliet became a classic. The ancient Greeks developed a whole literary genre based upon people ignoring what their betters told them was in their best interests and called it tragedy. But a lot of bridges have to burned before a child ceases to have some preference for parental approval if it is within the realm of the possible, and I'd like to believe that if this card is not overplayed that it can produce beneficial results for all involved.
Who Knows What Approach Works Best?
These observations don't come stamped with a double blind longitudinal study, or the after the fact certificate of approval that comes with kids who somehow managed to do well in the end once they grew up.
Of course, not even couples fully agree how to approach these matters. My wife is fond of very specific rules that contain the word "never," ideally presented long before the situations to which they apply come up. Despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that I'm a lawyer, I'm more inclined to generalized character building, talking about situations we encounter in our life, developing a way of thinking about problems, being a role model when I can, and honestly admitting my own shortcomings when I can't. I don't like to borrow worry and I prefer to take life's challenges as they come. She sees a parent as more like a law giver dispensing the Ten Commandments of life, while I see a parent as more like a teacher in a liberal arts curriculum or a socratic method law professor trying to get the students to draw their own conclusions from a case.
The combined effect may sometimes be incoherent on the receiving end. When they do children can arbitrage the approaches to some extent by seeking to be regulated by the preferred parental regime, or can simply do what they wish instead of what they have been told. What couples (and children) don't face these issues to some extent? But, because our values aren't that far from each other on the main objectives, we manage. Maybe we really suck at parenting, but have been blessed with children who were born predisposed to have half decent judgment anyway. There is really no way to know for sure. But fools rush in where angels fear to tread and in the absence of definitive data you do your best because you have to do make real choices every single day and live with them.
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